Vanity Metrics May Not Be All Bad

It’s becoming common wisdom in the SEO, startup, and marketing worlds that so-called vanity metrics are accursed trolls of numbers, sent from the fiery deep to confuse, mislead, and prey on the weak-minded marketer. E.g:

In a lot of ways, I agree with posts like those Eric Ries haswritten on the topic. Pivoting based on actionable metrics vs. those that may merely be leading indicators or are merely correlated but not causal seems like a smart idea. The problem is, a lot of the time, those metrics are very hard to gather and interpret, while vanity metrics are beautifully simple and available.

“But Rand,” I hear you cry, “you always say that nothing worth having comes easy, and that following the masses rather than finding your own unique path is a sure way to get mediocre results.”

I know. I’m conflicted on this advice, because it seems out of character for me to embrace this kind of thing. Let me explain my logic and then you can poke holes in it and help me figure out if I’ve gone totally mad.

Below is a screenshot from my Bit.ly account.

It’s almost spooky how these numbers line up with every other metric you might imagine

For the past few years, I’ve tracked nearly every blog post that I’ve written as I share them on social media channels using a simple bit.ly link. That’s not to say I don’t also have metrics that tie to conversion rates for email subscriptions, clicks to the Moz website, signups for free trials, etc. But honestly, I almost never look beyond the vanity metrics of clicks, traffic, retweets, shares, likes, and +1s. And whenever I do, I find the same story – those vanity metrics line up pretty well with the more sophisticated, more action-worthy metrics. Blog posts I write here that tend to get more bit.ly clicks tend to get more retweets, more shares, more likes, more +1s, more visits, more people signing up for email subscriptions, and, if we go deep and do multi-channel attribution, more free trials, too.

And because those vanity metrics are really, really simple to see, they encourage me. They bias me to action vs. analysis. When I write a post that does well, I want to write more posts like it. When I write a post that doesn’t do well, I want to write posts that do better. The same holds true for Twitter. When I see tweets that earn lots of retweets, I want to send more tweets like that, and when I send a tweet that gets no interaction, I want to send fewer of those.

Vanity metrics have trained me pretty darn well. They’ve given me a sixth sense for how a post/tweet/share will perform, and made me better at writing stuff people value and spread. That principle has worked well for Geraldine on her blog, too. She knows what resonates with her audience and what falls flat. It’s worked for a number of other bloggers and social media addicts I know, including plenty who you’d definitely assume “know better” than to use vanity metrics.

So here’s my advice: if vanity metrics make it easy for you to become a better producer of content, a better social media marketer, and/or a better doer of stuff you want to get good at, don’t let their simplicity and potentially-non-causal nature stop you. Just make sure that you have some way to track down to conversions, revenue, and lifetime value, and occasionally compare the two so you know you aren’t being misled.

p.s. Hat tip to Dharmesh, who noted that we share this point of view while at Mozcon.

Thank you for highlighting this topic. I’m fond of vanity metrics because I understand them and can pass them onto clients who will understand them. I do compare them often to other metrics means to make sure they line up…mainly they always do.Glad to read your insight.

http://www.decalmarketing.com/adwords-book/ Iain Dooley

I know this may sound like I’m playing semantics but all this means is that “number of shares” is not always a vanity metric.

By definition a vanity metric is one that is shallow and isn’t tied to any real value in your business (and in most cases hides a truth about your business such as lack of profitability, lack of scalability etc.)

In fact, you could argue that email subscriptions and free trial sign-ups in many cases are vanity metrics, it’s just that in your case you have data which ties email list numbers back to free trial sign-ups and you know your free -> paid conversion rate, therefore you have attributed a dollar value to an email sign-up.

In other words your “vanity metric” of bit.ly clicks is a proxy for other “vanity metrics” which are email sign-ups and free trials, but in your case they’re not really vanity metrics because you know that at the end of the funnel a certain number of people buy from you, and that the lifetime value of the customer once they start paying is sufficient to cover the cost of acquiring them.

The problem occurs when someone looks at your business, sees that you’re profitable, sees that you have lots of likes and shares, and assumes that “lots of likes and shares equals a profitable business” – that’s when they become vanity metrics.

http://www.HubSpot.com Dharmesh Shah

Thanks for the hat tip.The other nice thing about some vanity metrics, is that you can often see *other* people’s data too (like followers, retweets, etc.) — that’s often useful as a way to benchmark.

http://www.willcritchlow.com Will Critchlow

They correlate as long as you do roughly the same stuff. If you sought to blindly optimise these metrics, you would find all kinds of ways to improve them that didn’t help your business at all.

My problem is not with the vanity part, it’s with the metric part. I think you have described vanity motivators which work fine. The problem comes when you report them to others (boss, board, investors) and they become metrics because then if they aren’t going great you have an incentive to juice them.

If you aren’t the kind of person who games this kind of scorecard, then it sounds like a great approach. If you are tempted by improving these scores regardless of business benefit (typically founders aren’t) then they are less useful.

Even just casual use outside personal motivation starts breaking imo. Imagine you emailed to tell me about your best tweet ever (by these metrics: favorites, RTs etc). I would assume it was a joke or a current affairs tweet rather than your best slideshare deck.

http://www.letstalk-tech.com/ Fabio Virgi

Thanks for the insight Rand. I started my own blog (www.letstalk-tech.com) a few months ago to test my SEO capabilities and I’m content with the results so far. I pretty much rely on these ‘vanity metrics’ as an indicator of my content’s popularity and as you rightly said, it gives me that ‘sixth sense’.

graemefraser

I’m currently reading Lean Analytics and many of the things that you raise are exactly the sort of of questions I’ve been knocking around in my head. I’ve just made the switch from corporate marketing to start-up marketing, and the change from “vanity” to actionable metrics is marked. Like you, I use both but it’s important to understand the role each of them play and how they can or cannot guide you/benefit you/distract you.

Like Will said, its about the metrics that are reported on and the trouble with vanity metrics is when they get included in reporting. If hockey stick growth of monthly visitors is what is required in the monthly report then, then that’s all well and good, providing that there is a genuine anchor between it and measurable business growth. I think it’s about being completely transparent with the role that metrics play and setting expectations with senior management (and yourself) about what should be measured and reported.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s an education thing and it’s in any marketers interest to ensure that the right metrics, vanity or actionable, are being measured and reported.

http://www.discoverafricagroup.com/ Andre Van Kets

I agree 100 cement with you Rand.

If you’re using these simple metrics for yourself (and you know how these metrics correlate to the more meaningful conversion metrics), they can steer you away from analysis paralysis and drive you to a land of doing.

Harold Compton

Rand, Fully agree with you that they are good indicators but like you said it you don’t correlate them with other indicators you may find yourself chasing meaningless numbers.

http://digitalkeydesign.com/ Cuyler Pagano

I think the vanity metrics are a very good benchmark of exposure. Without the exposure the conversions will never come. So I agree that while vanity metrics aren’t the end all be all, they are a very good indicator of the response you will get based on the level of exposure.

Laura Grace

In a complex (read:large) system, sometimes vanity metrics are the only way to prove that you are moving the needle when proving a concept. Otherwise it is all too easy for skeptics for point fingers elsewhere for any increases in your hard metrics

http://www.shopletpromos.com/ Shoplet Promos

I definitely agree with all of this. Vanity metrics are simple/easy but in the right context, they can be very helpful. Of course – you’re going to need more data along side of it combined with some qualitative analysis. It’s also a good way to communicate results to others who may not want to see numbers that aren’t FB Likes, Sales and RTs.

Dan Shure

I may mess up this anecdote slightly (it might be from Gladwell’s “blink”), but there was a study where doctors being brought patients possibly having a heart attack were only given maybe 1/4 of the symptoms or typical metrics they usually get to make a decision about what to do. They correctly diagnosed an actual heart attack more often than doctors with 3x the metrics.

I apply this to analytics – I love creating custom reports with like TWO metrics (like just visits and conversions). I guess the takeaway can be that sometimes more information is not always better. Simplicity can bring clarity which can reduce deliberation and make for faster decisions.

http://www.boastingbiz.com/ Donnie Strompf

Fortunately for us as internet marketers we get a ton of data in comparison to a TV ad or Radio ad. We get to prove exactly what we do, or have done and how it will benefit ourselves or our clients… I wonder how one would go about creating vanity matrix prior to “on-the-line”(Vince Vaughn) days? 10 years ago a company had way less access to all this data, they would market their brand on the radio, TV, Yellow Pages, Billboards, Street Benches, Back of bus, and most importantly word of mouth marketing, they did this without much if any analytics. We are super fortunate to have analytics.

http://www.higherclick.com/ Gael Breton

Hey Rand, Nice thread and nice extension of our interview! I personally thing these metrics can or can not be vanity metrics but there often is one metric you will work on that will drastically improve your business.

That may be social shares but more often it is conversion rates, close rates and simply interest in your product offering (IE better offering definition etc). When you have your commercial offering, conversion funnel and sales team in place, then metrics like voice share etc become relevant and metrics such as tweets are not vanity anymore.

My issue is that many people worry about tweets, shares and +1’s when their conversion rates, close rates or offering are not here simply because it’s easier. This is when these things truly become vanity metrics and hurt your business.

http://www.blindfiveyearold.com AJ Kohn

I track my vanity metrics but I rarely use them to chart my future behavior. If I did, I worry that I’d lose my vision and creativity.

I don’t want to produce the equivalent to Transformers 4 just because 1, 2 and 3 were well received. (I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing but it’s an apt analogy.) Mind you, a lot of people like that stuff. And perhaps I fall prey to the ‘I used to like them when they weren’t popular’ mentality.

Yet, I could have blogged a lot more about Authorship and AuthorRank but I wanted to go and explore and do other things. In short, I feel like managing with vanity metrics could limit thought leadership.

Some of my favorite posts are ones that didn’t get a lot of love. Some posts which didn’t get a lot of love for a long time suddenly do when the dialog returns to that topic.

That’s not to say that user feedback doesn’t help you become a better writer/blogger, it does. But I’m also on guard from having it lead me astray. I frequently reference artists when this conversation comes up.

How many times do you listen to the new album by a favorite band and think it’s not quite up to snuff? It’s DIFFERENT. At first it’s a shock. It’s uncomfortable. But you listen again and again and again and over time you might fall in love with the new album.

Should Damon Albarn have continued with Blur? It would be sad not to have Gorillaz.

http://www.blueprintmarketing.com/ Thomas Zickell

Have you tried to move them over to awe.sm ? I would love to see the data they get from this.
Looking forward to Moz analytics.

All the best,
Tom

http://about.me/christopherryan Christopher Ryan

In case you missed it, Rand’s golden nugget: action vs. analysis.

How I see it:
1. Vanity and actionable metrics illustrate relationships in different forms of gratification.

3. Statistics can be paralyzing if you chase them too far down the rabbit hole

4. They’re not as fun as vanity metrics for a lot of people. Like it or not, that counts.

Think of it this way: We’re people. We leverage various forms of social proof in real life and digital communities. Does this shirt go with these pants? What’s your favorite movie? Wanna grab a burger? I’ve never had someone ask me if I wanna grab burgers at $6.50 or $12. (Maybe “vanity metrics” are to actionable metrics as top of the funnel is to bottom of the funnel.)

Ducks on the pond
If I was a small business owner with limited resources and zero knowledge of SEO and related industries, these vanity metrics would be very valuable to me. There are a host of situations where vanity metrics are valuable. It’s only hard to see if you’re scope is limited to the hard-nosed “live by metrics, die by metrics” context of this industry.

http://www.startupmanagement.org/ William Mougayar

Yup, I think it’s a cause and effect thing, as you pointed out. If the vanity metrics lead to other more significant outcomes, then be it.

http://battleoflongtan.reddunefilms.com/about/ Martin Walsh

I think one of the key issues not being discussed here is what type of metrics make sense when answering specific questions and importantly what are the right questions to be asking? Effective Marketing Measurement is about asking and answering the right questions and not simply capturing data for the sake of it, looking at data in context and not just focusing on Vanity and Volume based metrics.

For example, if my question is:

1. ‘What impact is marketing having on our revenue?’ then I’d use these key metrics –

But marketing measurement and metrics used also depend on the role of the individual. For example if my role is social media then I would have specific metrics which provide complete context in terms of the three categories outlined above:

1. Impact on Revenue
2. Diagnostic
3. Operational

One of the biggest problems often overlooked today is context. For example with Marketing Automation applications like Marketo & Eloqua I can now see in real time, specifically what organic or paid keywords are converting to sales and how long it takes for the SEO or PPC tactic/channel to convert (what we call sales velocity). If my team is just focused on 3. Operational metrics how do we know if this is positively impacting revenue either directly or influencing it? If my team just focused on 2. Diagnostic then I could have some members of my team focused on just driving new Names or numbers of Leads but not focusing on driving quality leads which convert to sales.

I’ve previously walked into a role where someone in the marketing team was focused on driving ‘leads’ (which in fact were really ‘prospects’ and not opportunities and sales. This resulted in very poor behaviour which drove lots of ‘leads’ but few of these leads actually converted to sales.

I’ve had the same where inherited team members were focused on driving #1 SERP for specific keywords but when we looked at the overall context and complete conversion paths using Marketing Automation we found they were not converting. The same is true whether it is social, display, webinars, events or anything else.

CleverPhD

Rand, you do mention that you have related your vanity metrics to your “action worthy metrics”. You have a feel for how they result in actual conversions. I think this is a key point. If you had not done that, would have felt as comfortable as you do with just looking at your vanity metrics (probably not). I think we all do this to a certain level. I have top level metrics and if something is off, I drill down. Otherwise, I do not want to waste my time with drilling down each time. Something else I would ask Rand, don’t you have “people” who get paid to pay attention to those actionable metrics and then get some “action” on them? Helps you to keep your overhead to a minimum so that you can function at the CEO level.

Howdy! I'm Rand

Co-founder of Moz and Inbound.org, startup junkie, frequent traveler, blogger, social media addict and evangelist of all things TAGFEE. More about me here.